Hulkster delivers a punishing body slam to The Game, followed by a... a body slam! Now it looks like he's signaling the crowd. He's- yes! He's setting him up for the BODY SLAM!

WWE Road to Wrestlemania X8
System: GBA
This game is a slightly inferior remake of an already bad game, WWF Road to Wrestlemania. Here's the exciting saga of why: besides the fact that there probably is a Satan who gets off on things like that, the World Wrestling Federation had to change its name. It lost a lawsuit to the World Wildlife Fund over the rights to the abbreviation WWF. Apparently, when both groups had the name, endangered species would get confused and put each other through flaming tables. And there was an incident where a paperwork mixup shipped Stone Cold Steve Austin to a zoo to impregnate their panda. Austin 3:16 says, "I just fucked your captive wild animal!"

Legal issues aside, the wrestlers in the game are stiff, grainy 3D renderings that move at the speed of erosion. The exceptional failure comes from the wrestlers having up to one move each-- I counted. There are flight simulators with more wrestling moves than this. However, while the matches quickly turn from boredom to nazi medical experiments on boredom, the buildup to each match is fantastic. WWERTWX8 is scrutinizingly faithful to each WWE Superstar's entrance; from the corpse-like waddle down the aisle to the twenty seconds of motionless idling in the center of the ring: it's all there! Pressing start lets you skip these, but when each one is exactly the same, who would want to?

ANNOTATION:
I often like to end with an absurdist variation on consumer advice, so I originally ended this article with a comment about how buying a skin disease might be a better use of your thirty dollars, but it didn't seem like a funny enough image to make up for the reader now having to come up with a scenario where they are being sold a skin disease. Does a man come door to door, take off his socks, and rub against you? That would be disgusting, not hilarious, and too big an intellectual hurdle for someone reading a review of a wrestling game. Or writing it, even.

So since there's no good back story to this violation of human rights for play on your Gameboy Advance, the annotation for this review will be in the form of an action wrestling comic starring me as Hulk Hogan, my girlfriend Natalie as the Ultimate Warrior, and EGM senior editor Crispin Boyer as Walker, Texas Ranger.